Background Removing Using Adobe Photoshop CS6 Tutorial

Removing or replacing the background is the most common photo editing
required for advertising and other purposes. Background removing is very often
the first thing neededfor advertising. The various media of advertising likemagazines,
newspapers, fashion magazines, posters, catalog, flyers, etc. need to apply
this technique before doing other types of photo manipulations. A rapid
increase of sell through e-commerce websites is taking place nowadays. As a
result, requirement for product photo background removal or replacement is
increasing very fast day by day.

Most of the
time not only replacing background is not enough but alsophotographic
corrections like brightness, contrast, levels, etc. is required to be adjusted.
If you are not interested to do the image manipulation yourself, be sure to
make confirm whether the image manipulation company is going to do this, as
well. If you choose a professional graphic design firm you may get some
corrections for freebecause a reputed firm will try to make sure the best
outputs for the price and their reputation.

Now I am
going to discuss how we can remove the background, and then add a new
background.

Although it
is a complex task, I am going to make it easy by explaining the process step by
step.

We are going
to use the following imagefor this tutorial. You can save the image to your
computer as welland go along with me. Click right mouse button on the image and
selecting “Save image as” from the menu.

We will change
the background of this image now.

Open the image

You can press Ctrl + O which
isShortcut for a Photoshop document. You can click on File -> Open alternatively.

Zooming the Image

Now, we will zoom the image up to 300%. Press Ctrl + Spacebar + click on the bottom left corner of the image to
zoom in. Press Ctrl + Alt + Spacebar +
click to zoom out. There are many alternatives of zooming operations. Such
as pressing Alt + Upward mouse scroll
to zoom in, and Alt + Downward mouse
scroll to zoom out. If you are comfortable with other method, such as
pressing Ctrl and ‘+’ simultaneously
to zoom in, and Ctrl and ‘-’ to zoom
out, you can use any of this method.

We will select the man’s figure with the pen tool now. Select the pen
tool from the toolbox.

How to use the pen tool efficiently

Although people are often afraid of using the pen tool, with some stoicism
and practice get started with the pen tool. You will become more faster and a
pro of the pen tool by practicing with patience day by day.

When we deal with the pen tool we put some “anchor points”, and give the needed curves between the two anchor
points using the “handles”. Sometimes
we do not need curves, we need cones. We are going to seeall these now. We will
learn the shortcut as well as efficient process of working with the anchor
points and handles. There are many other ways of working with the combinations
of “pen tool” and “selection tool”. You can practice of
making various shapes and/or tracing/cutting easy and simple objects from
images to get your hands fluent in pen tool.

At first, we have to select the pen
tool from the toolbox.

Let’s have a look on the following image now.

An anchor point is just a point or dot on the screen. We need the anchor
points to have handlesto make curves. To put just an anchor point, click on the
place of the image you want to put it and you will get an anchor point. Now if
you click on another place above and without releasing the mouse drag rightward
(or leftward for a reverse directional curved line) you will get two handles
associated with the 2nd anchor point. And you see, we’ve got a curved line in
between the anchor points. We can also change the curve by moving the handles,
and making the handles bigger or smaller. You can click on the handle while
pressing the Ctrl key and move the handle to any directionto move a handle, or
to make it bigger or smaller. If you move the left handle of the above image
the curve will change according to your movement of the handle.

Suppose now you want to make a straight line downward. For this, click on
the 2nd anchor point (with handles) while pressing the Alt key. This will
remove the right side handle.

To make a straight line to the shape, we will click on the bottom area
now. If we hold down the shift key while clicking, the line will be perfectly
vertical. So, we will hold down the shift key to get a perfect looking vertical
line.

We will click back to the 1st anchor pointto finish the shape of the
path. When we will place the pen pointer on the 1st anchor point a very small
circle will appear just under the pen tool pointer.

Select the man’s figure using the pen
tool

We will follow the above mentioned methods and tips of using the pen
toolto make the path around the figure of the man in the image.

Refine the edges of hair region

We have selected the hair region roughly, because we will comprise the
hairs in more detail now. At first, we will go for the refine edge methodfor
this. To make a selection of our path, press Ctrl + Enter now. To refine the edges, you should select the outer
areas of the hair which we’ve already selected. For doing this go to the menu –
Select -> Refine Edge menu
option. When the refine edge pop up, menu comes up.

With the refine edge brush select the unselected hair outside of the
selection.

Refine edge dialog box.

Now with the refine edge brush, we rub over the unselected hairs on the
edge. This will select those hairs.

Rubbing on the hair edge pic –1

Rubbing on the hair edge pic – 2

Rubbing on the hair edge pic – 3

Rubbing on the hair edge pic – 4 (finishing this process)

After we are satisfied with selecting the necessary hairs, we got to
press OK button of the Refine Edge dialog box. This will
select the figure of the person we want to get in a new background.

Placing the object (the man) in new
background

Press Ctrl + C to copy the
selection.

Open the image we want to be in a new background.

The new background we are going to use now.

Now press Ctrl + V to paste
the man’s figure without the old background. This will paste the figure on a
new layer.

A new layer created with the man’s figure.

Now, we need to place the figure to the right place. Press the “V” key or select the move tool from the toolbox. Move the layer with the mouse to place the figure to
the right place. We can use the arrow keys to place the man perfectly in place.

The man is in a new background.

And finally, the background is removed. We’ve done a pretty good job. Keep smiling.